Kickoff: How to Watch BPL Online

Singaporeans are avid football fans. Missing a weekend BPL match of your favourite team can be a major bummer for some. When our wonderful broadcast providers Singtel, Starhub start to charge an exorbitant price (S$59.90) to watch the Barclay Premier League matches, fans need to become creative to get their footie fix. As a continuation from the World Cup streaming fever, here’s what creative fans in Singapore are up to to watch the matches.

Online Streaming Services (free)

Matches are re-streamed on services such as Sopcast / Acestream – links would often be posted up an hour before match time. There are websites that aggregate the links so just head to them to get the latest. One of the most popular and oldest would be Wiziwig. They publish a number of channels, from Sopcast to Acestream and to Flash. However, Sopcast streams tend to get taken down pretty quickly, typically minutes into the match. It seems that if you can connect prior to the kickoff and establish the peer connections, you are pretty much safe. Acestream is getting more popular – but I find the bandwidth use to be more intensive. AceStream uses a peer-to-peer distribution similar to BitTorrent to share live video streams between users. This means that a streamer can set up an AceStream stream, and once users begin to watch the stream, they will help each other to view the stream by uploading the stream to other users. Setup guides on acestreamguide.com is pretty extensive and contains links to the popular channels as well.

PremierLeaguePass ($5 / month)

Premier League Pass is an NZ company – that offers online viewing of the BPL matches through pretty high quality streams (4500K). As most paid services do, e.g. BEIN or Al Jazeera, geographical location block is enforced. This can be bypassed with proxy services or DNS routing services.

Do note that in order to get the price above of $5 / month, you need to spoof a taiwan IP to access Premier League Pass on Taiwan, which charges the lower rates. You can use Hola to do so. Turn on Hola and select the Taiwan server. Purchase the account with the monthly plan and after logging in, you can disable Hola for a faster surfing experience. If you have Unotelly, you can use it as well, for DNS spoof to Premier League Pass NZ servers.

China IPTV (Free to $7 / month)

There are a number of China IPTV settop boxes that promises live footy premier league action. Maige is one of them, but it is also generally the priciest at around $400+ for the box alone. It’s quite a hefty sum for a box that could potentially be taken down the next weekend, although Maige has been pretty resilient off late, and survived a big fiasco on Hong Kong channels a short while back.

A cheaper option if you have an Android box or phone capable of streaming to a TV could be the cloudtv.bz which has an Android application that you can download. They offer both free and paid channels.

Black Box Decoders (one time $)

Ever since Starhub switched to Nagra 3, the black box decoders have been greatly affected and now they require the sharing of the decoder code via online authentication before they can work. Hence, most resellers offer them at a caveat that the access would be limited to a year.